Today West Virginia University announced of one of the state’s most powerful computer clusters to help power research and innovation statewide. “The Thorny Flat High Performance Computer Cluster, named after the state’s second highest peak, joins the Spruce Knob cluster as resources. With 1,000 times more computing power than a desktop computer, the Thorny Flat cluster could benefit a variety research: forest hydrology; genetic studies; forensic chemistry of firearms; modeling of solar-to-chemical energy harvesting; and design and discovery of new materials.”

Today AIC announced a world-record in data transfer: one petabyte in 29 hours encrypted data transfer, with data integrity checksum unconditionally enabled, over a distance of 5000 miles. The average transfer rate is 75Gbps, or 94% utilization of the available bandwidth of 80Gbps. “Even with massive amounts of data, this test confirmed once more that it’s completely feasible to carry out long distance, fully encrypted and checksum-ed data transfer at nearly the line-rate, over a shared and production network.”

In this slidecast, Trish Damkroger from Intel presents: Technology Trends Driving HPC. “HPC is now critical for more use cases, complex workloads, and data-intensive computing than ever before. From AI and visualization to simulation and modeling, Intel provides the advantage of one platform for any workload by integrating world-class compute with powerful fabric, memory, storage, and acceleration. You can move your research and innovation forward faster to solve the world’s most complex challenges.”

Today Penguin Computing (a subsidiary of SMART Global Holdings) announced that it will deliver the new national supercomputer to the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway. “With 11 supercomputers in the Top500 list and a bare-metal HPC Cloud service since 2009, we knew we could rely on Penguin Computing’s HPC expertise to address our needs in an innovative way.”

In today’s world where science and engineering depend on the simulation of new materials and their behavior is of critical importance. New materials are constantly being designed and brought into product design in order to create products that can withstand many environmental conditions and still perform for their intended use. HPC is critical for the simulation of these materials and applications which perform at the fastest speed available on a given hardware platform can lead to earlier introduction of products that contain these materials.

Princeton’s new flagship TIGER supercomputer is now up and running at their High-Performance Computing Research Center (HPCRC). As a hybrid system, TIGER is built from a combination of Intel Skylake chips and NVIDIA Pascal P100 GPUs, adding up to a peak performance of 2.67 Petaflops peak performance. “Computation has become an indispensable tool in accomplishing that mission,” Dominick said. “With the newest addition to our High-Performance Computing suite, Princeton continues to equip its faculty with the most advanced computational tools available. The TIGER cluster, and the remarkable staff that support it, are symbolic of the University’s commitment to sustained excellence.”

In this video from ISC 2018, Joe Yaworski from Intel describes how the newly announced Intel® Omni-Path fabric, Intel® OPA200 interconnect will speed up HPC and AI applications. “Intel shared at ISC its next-generation Omni-Path Architecture (Intel® OPA200), coming in 2019, which will provide data rate speeds up to 200 Gb/s, doubling the performance of the previous generation. This next-generation fabric will be interoperable and compatible with the current generation of Intel® OPA. Intel® OPA200’s high-performance capabilities and low-latency at scale will provide system architects the ability to scale to tens of thousands of nodes while benefiting from improved total cost of ownership.”

The ExaComm 2018 workshop has posted their Speaker Agenda. Held in conjunction with ISC 2018, the Fourth International Workshop on Communication Architectures for HPC, Big Data, Deep Learning and Clouds at Extreme Scale takes place June 28 in Frankfurt. ” The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and software/hardware designers from academia, industry and national laboratories who are involved in creating network-based computing solutions for extreme scale architectures. The objectives of this workshop will be to share the experiences of the members of this community and to learn the opportunities and challenges in the design trends for exascale communication architectures.”

Intel is working with leaders in the field to eliminate today’s data processing bottlenecks. In this guest post from Intel, the company explores how BioScience is getting a leg up from order-of-magnitude computing progress. “Intel’s framework is designed to make HPC simpler, more affordable, and more powerful.”

Today Sweden’s National Supercomputing Centre (NSC) at Linköping University announced it has awarded ClusterVision a contract to build its new flagship cluster, Tetralith. Available to all researchers in Sweden, the 4 Petaflop machine will be Scandinavia’s most powerful yet with 60,544 cores based on Intel Xeon.

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Industry Perspectives

Often, it’s not enough to parallelize and vectorize an application to get the best performance. You also need to take a deep dive into how the application is accessing memory to find and eliminate bottlenecks in the code that could ultimately be limiting performance. Intel Advisor, a component of both Intel Parallel Studio XE and Intel System Studio, can help you identify and diagnose memory performance issues, and suggest strategies to improve the efficiency of your code. [READ MORE…]

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